Barrier to Web 2.0 — IT Departments

jcatcw writes "Wikis, social networks, and other Web 2.0 technologies are finding resistance inside companies from the very people who should be rolling them out: the IT staff. The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in London had to bypass IT to get Web 2.0 technologies to end users. Both Morgan Stanley and Pfizer are rolling out Web 2.0 projects, but it took some grass roots organizing to get there."

Too bad!

[X0563511]

IT doesn't want Web 2.0 but end users do. Too bad! End users typically don't know what is good for them when it comes to computers and networking.

Web 2.0 is a bloated, risky, pointless waste of time, money, bandwidth, and electricity.

Or at least that is my opinion. ... opinions are not trolls or flamebait. Please don't mod me down because I'm testy, you don't agree, or you think I am being "stuck up". Reply instead.

And why they shouldnt bar it ?

[unity100]

Executive/marketing people are following the "hip" hype (reminds me of apple people) - just to make more flash and bang on user interface end and creating work equal to actual realization of a non web2.0 site, out of nowhere.

and not even having the vision to realize that all those nitty gritty stuff like ajax with highly exploitable activex, javascript, xml components are going to be summarily blocked by security software in near future. (some already creating problems)and the it peoplew will have to redo the thing all over to suit the security software producers' tastes this time.

no sir, it doesnt matter if a decent menu opens when you click a webpage, or it opens by turning and flashing and banging in some corner of the webpage whilst you were doing some other flashing and banging in another corner. data is the same, service is the same, exploitable security potential and work involved in realizing them are NOT.

Pfizer?

[winkydink]

The same Pfizer that just announced yet another loss of identity data and has been fingered as having compromised hosts that are sending out Viagra spam? (I am not making this up!)

Something tells me that these guys need to be working more closely with their IT department, not less.

Absolutely true

[hobo sapiens]

The company I work for is a VERY large tech company. We are JUST NOW starting to roll out things like Wiki and forum based support for applications, social networking software, etc. It's quite sad. I am sure this is the case in most IT departments in most large corporations. I have some theories as to why:

1) the obvious, resistance from upper management. Upper management is afraid of being "bleeding edge". New stuff, and especially open source stuff, is scary. PHBs fail to realize that the F/OSS community operates on a different set of values than corporations. Corporations only offer free stuff if it gets them good PR or creates a bunch of indentured customers. There is much FOSS that is quite viable, but it usually gets turned down in favor of proprietary crap.

2) complacent IT staff. In many large companies, the people who make decisions have promoted to their level of incompetence. In turn, they just phone it in, just do the minimum they need to do to get by. This precludes their actually learning anything new. When the decision makers are victims of FUD, what do you want?

3) red tape. Where I work, if you want to use non-standard software you have submit an exception, which then has to get approved by the people in bullet point number 2 above. It also has to get sent to upper management. Some supervisors are afraid of that and so strongly discourage you from submitting these exceptions. So people just use the same old software in the same old ways and nobody actually keeps up with the industry.

Case in point: on my intranet, AJAX use is still pretty small scale. Maybe for certain internet sites, AJAX isn't always appropriate, but on the intranet, where you can ensure that everyone is using a somewhat modern browser, it's an obvious choice for certain things. Yet, you still have people developing sites the same way sites have been developed for ten years. I use AJAX heavily, and you'd be surprised how people are still amazed by it. But now there is a push to call libraries like prototype "software" and thus make them subject to regulation and corporate standards. Standards committees cannot keep up with the industry, so you have a situation where you cannot, by decree, use anything *too* new. I can see disallowing joe service rep from installing webshots on his PC, but disallowing a developer from using his software of choice is pretty shortsighted.

De-aggregate angsty tags to IT channel-partners.

[delire]

Web 2.Oooh isn't a technology, a thing or even a classifiable approach to client-server engineering. It's the term given to a fad whereby users freely contribute content to increase the bankable assets of entrepreneurs that generally use impossibly complex and dubious EULA's for their own gain.

Perhaps IT staff aren't keen on implementing it because they don't buy into The Silliness. Call it "Capitalism Meets Social Engineering 2.0" and perhaps the guys in suits with MacBooks and artistic mohawks might have takers in IT.

As Mark Pilgrim so eloquently put it [diveintomark.org]:

"Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel. I'm not saying data export isn't important, it's just aiming kinda low. You mean when I give you data, you'll give it back to me? People who think this is the pinnacle of freedom aren't really worth listening to."

For those of you wanting to make a proverbial killing of this 'phenomenon' I refer you to a vital dictionary of terms [emptybottle.org].

What is a Web 2.0 tool?

[Fizzlewhiff]

The article didn't really give an examples other than 1000 people signed up for LinkedIn to prove a point.

I work in IT and we occasionally get requests from the business to do something in PHP, MySql and AJAX and they have no idea what they are even talking about other than they see it mentioned in a magazine article or a blog somewhere so they think they need everything done in PHP and MySql. These are the same people who think that if an icon isn't on their desktop the application isn't on their computer.

Re:And why they shouldnt bar it ?

[moderatorrater]

It can provide feedback as the user types, it can embed an IM window in the page, and it can update the mail while the user's still reading it so that they don't miss a reply that would invalidate theirs. None of those things can be done completely with a server side language. The complete disregard of a technology is as bad as its overuse.

Re:Possible Explanation

[The Great Pretender]

I'm supporting the parent here. The ego's associated to our IT department were astronomic. They actually believed that they can never be fired because they were the only ones who know the 'guts' of our infrastructure. You should have seen them drop a load in their shorts when we had the whole IT infrastructure review by a third party. They pointed out the security risks that hadn't been noticed, the short-falls, the poor implementation (from a business perspective) and more importantly the fact that 25% time was being wasted by IT on IT 'pet' projects that had no sign-off from management. We fired the whole department except for a temp and hired him full-time because he actually worked efficiently and restocked (out-sourcing during the re-hire process). Now we have a more secure system and an IT group who are actually responsive to the IT needs of the company, rather than pretendeding that the IT position was a personal hobby. What a bunch of arrogant, egotistical, slackers we had.

Re:Possible Explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

The post is fine. If folks want to see the original formatting for clarity, select the text and View Source. Go easier on yourself, anyone can err.

Re:Possible Explanation

[raddan]

Perhaps it's because IT departments actually know how complicated, messy, potentially insecure and how awful support of such "projects" are going to be. As a general rule of thumb, tech-types don't usually give into the hype about things like Web 2.0 that columnists, marketers and your usual assortment of weirdos do.

On the other hand, we got the dictum from the central IT group the other day that we were going to start filtering websites across a wide variety of categories. Among the obvious candidates (porn, spyware sites, online gambling, etc) they decided to include Skype, Facebook, GMail, Victoria's Secret (WTF? Are people really getting off on this?), iTunes Music Store, streaming-anything, and a number of sites that our competitors run (college textbook publishing)-- regardless of whether these services make business sense to keep around. E.g., Skype saves us TONS of money, and that, for some reason, is public enemy #1 with them.

Anyway, the [ostensible] reason? To save on bandwidth. This argument is obvious bullshit. In our local office, we have roughly 25% utilization of a 100Mbps fiber line. This was 50% cheaper than the ISDN connection we were contractually locked into for years! Having some familiarity with our budget, I can say that bandwidth is a very small cost for us.

So my opinion is: yeah, it's not surprising that IT departments are blocking web innovation. In my experience, they're generally lazy, worthless cretins. They're probably doing it to save themselves work, or having to think. At least the BOFH enjoyed his job. These guys are... just worthless.

And, FWIW, I, too am an IT worker. With some rare exceptions, most IT workers I have worked with have proven themselves to be a rather uninspiring lot. Those exceptional people, though, are what keep me around.

Re:Possible Explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

In case the BOFH decides to activate the Halon system by the server farm (if applicable).

Re:Possible Explanation

[jp10558]

The reason we've blocked Skype is because
A) per GB bandwidth charges
B) Supernodes/passthrough etc
C) EULA is untenable for us
D) enough doubt regarding just what it's doing at a low level over and over again. Maybe FUD but there's lots of stuff like Asterix gateways, EVO, standard SIP that don't have this so why risk it?

I work in IT, we built a Wiki but nobody came.

[Nonesuch]

I'm part of the tiny IT Security department of a Fortune 500 with many offices around the world. We're understaffed and overburdered with "approvals" and "sign-offs" and other process, but we make do with what we have.

So earlier this year we had a conference call with the various remote site operations and networking and help desk We had a bunch of customers saying "Why doesn't the company use Web 2.0? Why is Instant Messaging discouraged? Why is there no Wiki on the Intranet?"

While this wasn't a priority, we had a small server sitting idle from a failed project. So we built a MediaWiki server, gave it a catchy DNS name, and configured it so anybody who can authenticate to the company LDAP server has an auto-created Wiki account. Even preloaded the server with the Help: namespace and some documents from IT's old file share. I also contacted the biggest site's help desk and inquired whether they would be interested in importing their "how to" documents, but only got a snarky "I know what a Wiki is, and we don't want any" reply.

After some testing internally, about two weeks ago we send out a preliminary announcement about the new Wiki to 100 "power users", including the specific individuals who were complaining about the lack of a Wiki. The response?

Deafening silence.
Perhaps fifty users bother to click on the link, a dozen of those logged in, and four go so far as to create a personal "User" page or make a test edit to one of the existing pages. You can lead users to a wiki, but you can't make them contribute.

Skype is corporate security enemy #1

[Nonesuch]

, Skype saves us TONS of money, and that, for some reason, is public enemy #1 with them.

I agree with your IT department 100% on Skype. That is one creepy closed-source product/protocol which has no place in a business network.

I've been trying for the past year to get Skype/EBay to talk to us at all, to even begin to have a conversation about how to securely enable internal clients to make and receive Skype phone calls without also enabling any and all other encrypted peer-to-peer applications.

Because that is what Skype really is, on the wire -- an obfuscated, encrypted peer-to-peer tunnel in which anything can be exchanged between the internal PC running Skype and a random workstation in some former soviet block nation which it appears to be using as a supernode. Any network where you can reliably use Skype, you can use the same network and host security holes to run P2P filesharing, botnets, or anything else your dark little twisted heart desires.

Maybe...

[Whuffo]

Maybe after all the IT layoffs the remaining staff is busy trying to keep the current systems running - and just doesn't have the man hours available to implement some new Web 2.0 stuff much less support it.

Hey, corporate suit - remember when you were rolling out metrics so you could determine which IT staff you'd keep and which you'd fire (for questionable reasons - no layoffs, don't want to pay unemployment). Now you think you need to make some significant changes - but the remaining IT staff is already overworked doing their jobs, plus the jobs of all the people you got rid of (and got a nice bonus for reducing IT payroll).

The chickens have come home to roost - time to pay the piper...

our geek toys and U can't have them :P

[marxzed]

first a personal aside - web 2? web smooo more like all this web 2 yammering just sounds more like web 1 beta before its corporate dot com boom.

well like DUH!!! these are our geek toys and you can't have them you plebs!!!!

more seriously I work in IT supporting an educational institute that teaches, among other IT related things - online business and marketing which requires academics to use real world examples and students to work on projects that produce examples (online video, web pages etc etc) yet the very same IT department that I work for and supports them it telling the school's administrators that "the academics only need 2.4GB of network/server storage, that they only need a couple of hundred MB of internet download quota per year, that they don't need web servers for anything other than hosting the intranet services and "corporate website" , routinely block sites like YouTube despite these being used in several units that staff are not allowed to purchase computers with built in video cameras (like many ACER and Apple models do) etc etc etc... no irony is lost in the fact that most of the IT staff have machines on their desk with web cameras their own server with a TB of unused storage, and unrestricted downloads because "we need it to do our job" and actually their right we do need it to do our job but we have to realise that these days THEY need these tools too.

so what we have is a small group of people in IT pretty much dictating to administration terms that cause very serious restrictions on what academics can teach, and what students can learn.

Re:Possible Explanation

[Antique Geekmeister]

And even richer when the old system running that business app has to be maintained on the network, with out of date OS, shared accounts with admin privileges, no backup, no hardware support, and it's five years later and the person who wrote the strange proprietary odd system on it left 3 years ago. I've been asked to deal with or salvage such sysems at least annually for years. It can be fun, but it's a huge timesink.

Re:Possible Explanation

[dnoyeb]

IT is full of shit. I can see me telling my Boss "I dont write software for freescale micros" I only support ST micros. I would be fires so quick.

How can IT think it can tell us what software it does and does not support? And they when they don't support it they can provide no alternatives...

My company uses lots of software tools to do our jobs. They are not MS certified so these idiots can never backup a computer right because all they do is the MS backup job of copying registry and MyDocuments folder.

Sure, the department head should be fired. IT should support departments, not specific software packages.